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A New Era in Political Corruption

Have you ever noticed how high the bar is when it comes to getting arrested for political corruption? Really, you practically have to go around with a sign that says “Will Trade Influence for Cash.”

I have been thinking about this because New York is having awful corruption scandals. The charges involve politicians acting in such an insanely stupid way, it shatters our longstanding confidence that taking money was the one thing they know how to do well.

We have a Democratic state senator, Malcolm Smith, under indictment for trying to buy the Republican New York City mayoral nomination. Nobody knows what he wanted with it, since Smith has no real supporters, a stupendously bad record even by State Senate standards and could not actually be elected mayor if he were running against Donald Trump’s retriever.

Prosecutors say his henchman was Councilman Daniel Halloran, a Tea Party Republican and a practitioner of Theodism, a strain of Germanic neopaganism. That may make Halloran the highest-ranking self-identified heathen in American politics, so already we have a little bit of a national spin on this saga.

Also there’s Eric Stevenson, an unremarkable assemblyman from the Bronx accused of taking bribes from some men who wanted to start adult day care centers. Among other things, he introduced legislation prohibiting anybody else from opening a similar facility anywhere in the New York City area. Even in Albany, this idea is not likely to garner much support, but it’s a tribute to the ethos of the State Capitol that people seemed prepared to believe it could happen.

According to the indictments, one Republican official from Queens frisked a briber, who was actually an undercover F.B.I. agent, to make sure he wasn’t wearing a wire. Then failed to find the wire. Then took the bribe while being recorded. This all happened at a super-secret meeting at Sparks, the steakhouse where John Gotti had Paul Castellano rubbed out. I believe there should be an unwritten rule in criminal conspiracy that you do not schedule your big payoff at the most famous gangland murder site in Manhattan.

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Gail CollinsCredit
Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Prosecutors say Stevenson, the Bronx assemblyman, was also worried about whether he was being taped. He expressed those concerns to a co-conspirator who was actually doing the taping.

Everybody was taping everybody! Plus these secret plots seemed to require more participants than the cast of “Game of Thrones.” All of them muttering what sounded like lines stolen from Season Two of “Bad Knockoff Sopranos.”

“We have a system that only catches morons,” sighed a member of the State Legislature’s brave but not terribly large band of reformers.

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Yeah, why didn’t these guys do things the normal way? A donation to the campaign war chest and a promise to “keep in close contact,” followed by a visit from a lobbyist with a copy of the proposed legislation?

“Most lawmakers in Congress do a lot of that stuff. They’re just more tactful in how they go about it,” said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. She recalled the recent discovery that Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey had been using his influence to try to resolve a multimillion-dollar Medicare billing dispute for a Florida ophthalmologist whose company contributed more than $700,000 toward the election of Senate Democrats, Menendez included. The senator, who is nothing if not a skilled practitioner of business as usual, is shocked, wounded and dismayed that anyone would imagine a quid pro quo.

“At least he’s expensive,” Sloan said.

Our New York gang comes pretty cheap. Although perhaps it’s heartening to realize that America is still a country so filled with promise that even the chairman of the Bronx Republican Party can dream of one day being indicted for taking a $15,000 bribe. There are hardly any Republicans in the Bronx to chair — the party leader himself, who got the job when his predecessor went to the clink, actually lives someplace in the suburbs.

One of the stranger elements to the New York story was word that a Bronx assemblyman named Nelson Castro has been wearing a wire for the feds for virtually his entire political career. He originally got into trouble when election officials noticed nine voters were registered as living with him in his one-bedroom apartment. Unable to demonstrate how all that worked out, Castro agreed to cooperate with authorities and became the F.B.I.’s own social networking system. Nobody knows yet what else showed up on the Castro tapes, but the assemblyman announced his resignation this week, expressing pride “of my accomplishments and the many benefits that I have secured on behalf of my district over the last four years.”

So, here’s a hopeful thought: maybe you can hit a point of ethical bankruptcy where, for want of anybody else to sell out, all the plotters betray each other.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 6, 2013, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: A New Era In Political Corruption . Today's Paper|Subscribe